Gender and Sexuality are Constitutive of our Political Lives with Aylon Cohen

To round off this year's LGBTQ+ History Month celebrations, we managed to catch up with Dr. Aylon Cohen on their current research projects in relation to Queer studies and its importance within DPIR.

 

 

I am currently engaged in two interrelated projects. On the one hand, I am working on a book manuscript on the origins of manhood democracy in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, tracing how the criminalization of sodomy and the policing of men’s bodily relations shaped the emergence of fraternity as an political ideal of equality. I'm interested in how the development of new forms of ordinary intimacy and touch between men, such as shaking hands, hugging, and kissing, habituated men into new political relations of equality and what role the increasing policing of sodomy played in this story. On the other hand, I am researching how authoritarian movements in the twenty-first century mobilize gender and sexuality as strategies to consolidate power. For example, Viktor Orbán banning gender studies, Vladimir Putin designating LGBTQ+ movements as extremist organizations, and Donald Trump’s executive order declaring there to be only two sexes are not distractions of identity politics but a tactic common to authoritarian regimes.

 

Taken together, it could be said that these projects map the rise and the current fall of liberal democracy. My work in queer-feminist political theory shows how topics of gender and sexuality, ordinarily considered to be niche concerns of sexual and gender minorities, are in fact central to how we understand concepts such as equality or sovereignty that organize our political lives.

 

 

My work builds directly on LGBTQ+ history and draws on its archival discoveries and insights to contribute to the nascent field of queer political theory. I am indebted to the work of historians, especially early gay and lesbian scholars who often worked outside the university, and whose recovery of early modern sexual worlds made it possible to see sex, sodomy, and erotic desire as public and political categories. For instance, my research draws on this historical work to develop an interpretive method that could be called queer intellectual history by rereading canonical texts of seventeenth and eighteenth century political thought through the histories of sex and sexual desire that have always underwritten them.

 

 

Queer scholarship remains relatively marginalized within political science as a discipline at large and the DPIR has provided the institutional support to make possible the development of queer political work, especially in a political climate that sees the lifeworlds of gender and sexual minorities increasingly under threat. I am officially hired as the Departmental Lecturer for Feminist Theory and I teach the recently established undergraduate special paper in Feminist Theory, the existence of which marks important recognition of gender and feminism as core dimensions of political and philosophical thought. Unfortunately, there is, as of yet, no comparable paper for  LGBTQ+ politics within the undergraduate curriculum, which makes departmental support for research in this area all the more significant. I am grateful that my work in the DPIR has been able to develop within an intellectual environment and departmental culture that values analytical sharpness, conceptual rigor and intellectual pluralism.